Tim Grierson is Screen’s senior US critic, based in Los Angeles, has written for the publication since 2005.
Read our other critics’ top tens here.
Top 10
1. The Zone Of Interest
Dir. Jonathan Glazer
Human beings are not monsters — it is what they do that makes them monstrous. Glazer’s shattering fourth feature strips away the clichés of the Holocaust drama, presenting a fascinating skeletal story of a soulless Nazi couple (the chillingly blank Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller) enjoying their privilege in the literal shadow of a concentration camp. The cameras stare impassively at this bourgeois pair, not so that we can empathise or understand, but so that we can take the full measure of their moral blindness — and perhaps our own. The Zone Of Interest’s glare never relents and never lets us look away or forget.
2. Past Lives
Dir. Celine Song
A love story about a love that never was, writer/director Song’s immaculate debut examines the missed connection between Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), childhood best friends whose lives sent them down separate paths, their worlds nonetheless finding the occasional overlap. Compassionate to all three sides of this romantic triangle — John Magaro is wonderful as Nora’s wary husband — Past Lives illuminates matters of the heart with an impossibly wistful clarity.
3. Janet Planet
Dir. Annie Baker
Like Past Lives, Janet Planet was the first feature from an acclaimed playwright. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/director Baker sharply reimagines the coming-of-age drama, casting newcomer Zoe Ziegler as a socially anxious 11-year-old only slowly understanding the enigma that is her restless mother (Julianne Nicholson). The action unfolds over one momentous summer, the images faded and evocative like a memory trying to be recalled.
4. His Three Daughters
Dir. Azazel Jacobs
With the death of their complicated father imminent, three women reluctantly spend time in each other’s orbit, redefining their relationship while awaiting his passing. Jacobs’ seventh feature is easily his finest, bringing together Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne in this intimate and devastating treatise on grief and the things we don’t say to one another until it is possibly too late.
5. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell
Dir. Pham Thien An
The deserving winner of the Camera d’Or at 2023’s Cannes Film Festival, Vietnamese writer/director Pham’s atmospheric wonder follows an adrift young man (Le Phong Vu) who returns home after the tragic death of his sister-in-law. Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell fully embeds the viewer in its lulling, poetic vision, the silences speaking volumes about our capacity for renewal and transformation.
6. Here
Dir. Bas Devos
7. Passages
Dir. Ira Sachs
8. Maestro
Dir. Bradley Cooper
9. The Iron Claw
Dir. Sean Durkin
10. Oppenheimer
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Best documentary
1. Occupied City
Dir. Steve McQueen
Past and present clash provocatively in McQueen’s intellectually rigorous four-hour-plus documentary, juxtaposing shots of modern Amsterdam with voiceover accounts of the atrocities that occurred in those locations during the Nazi occupation. An unanticipated companion piece to The Zone Of Interest, Occupied City articulates how the ghosts of old sins haunt our contemporary spaces, refusing to fade into history.
2. Four Daughters
Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania
Tunisian writer/director Ben Hania recounts the gutting story of a mother who lost two of her four daughters to Isis, the filmmaker casting actresses to portray the two women and their mother alongside the real-life family members. Therapeutic but also emotionally raw, Four Daughters is a deft bit of cinematic role-play and a heartbreakingly personal portrait of the pain of radicalisation.
3. 20 Days In Mariupol
Dir. Mstyslav Chernov
As the Russian shelling of Ukraine continues, 20 Days In Mariupol stands as a sobering frontline snapshot. Photojournalist Chernov captures the confusion and sheer terror of a warzone, the sense there is no escape — and that there is no end in sight.
Performance of the year
Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Dir. Kelly Fremon Craig
What makes McAdams’ portrayal of Barbara, the kindly mother in Judy Blume’s indelible novel, so moving is how she renders the invisible visible. As her precocious daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) experiences puberty, Barbara is quietly enduring her own crossroads as a woman stripped of her passions because of the sheltered suburban community to which they have just moved. McAdams is brilliant at elucidating a mum’s silent struggles while being there for her anxious child.
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